From: Benjamin Adler <benadler@gmx.net>
To: fam@oss.sgi.com
Subject: fam questions
Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 00:05:20 +0200
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Hi!

I'm trying to build a KDE app that will have to watch a complete directory 
tree and wants to be informed of any changes in that tree. After realizing 
KDirWatch is not really everything I need, I have a few questions:

When famd is running and I tell KDirWatch to recursively monitor /tmp and 
create the file /tmp/foo.txt, I get a notification. When I create the 
file /tmp/foo/bar.txt, I get no notification, so its not recursive.

When famd is not running, the notifications are faster, but not recursive 
either and they only contain the directory of the changed file, not even the 
filename.

Why is that?

There was no entry named either dnotify or imon in my gentoo 2.6.7 kernel. 
Which of these two is currently in the kernel, and whats is available as a 
patch for linux 2.6?

How can I find out what fam is using to get the notifications? "famd -f -d -v" 
doesn't help.

What do I need for KDirWatch to reliably and recursively deliver a 
notification of a changed file/directory in the tree?

While reading up on fam, I got the impression that noone is really satisfied 
with how fam/dnotify/imon work. If I understood correctly, it cannot easily 
watch directories recursively, it cannot watch large numbers of 
files/directories, it cannot send ONE event AFTER a file has changed but 
always sends multiple events WHILE a file is being written to, it makes 
unmounting a watched directory difficult etc.

Is there any effort underway to fix these flaws?

thank you!
Ben Adler